Auraknot

I skipped out on Diva’s “moving” challenge because I prefer to do my tangling while sitting still. But this week’s challenge, “circles” was right in my wheelehouse (see what I did there?)

I started with this for my string:

The outermost ring is a CD — the template I usually use for the Zendala things I do obsessively and that I’ll get around to posting someday. The other circles are various other round things lying around — a toy cookie from my kids’ play kitchen, the inner circle of the CD, one of those plastic baby ring-stacker rings. So that was fun. Rather than doing any specific tangles, I decided to do a variation of Stricles: I drew a wobbly sort of grid across it, then filled in the cells with various solids and stripes — and one column of Nipa.

Diva Challenge 277

I left it unshaded for now. I might go back and shade some more later, but I kind of like the plain look so far.

The focus-tangle for this one is a cool little thing called “Pearly” that I just encountered. The pearls reminded me of Purk, always a favorite of mine, and the star shape of the string made me think of Arukas and Auraknot. I also used a tangleation of Pand I’ve worked up that I call Rzr.

As I understand it, this is the penultimate Joey Roman Numeral challenge. But hey, I can always continue them: it’s not like I’ll run out of Roman Numerals, although it will probably be hard to string something like MDCCCLXXII.

I decided pretty quickly that the big spaces above and below the numeral should be great big barber poles, then it was pretty easy to decide on barber poling the rest of the string as well. I tried a variety of patterns for the poles — not certain how well it worked, but it was interesting. There’s also Bunzo and Shattuck — both of these are ones I initially had a really hard time with but have really enjoyed now that I have the hang of it. There were two new-to-me background tangles — Papyrus and Cheesecloth. I like the look of Cheesecloth but I’m not so sure I enjoyed drawing MDCCCLXXII teeny tiny lines. Also, the Cadent didn’t show up quite as well as I would have liked.

Before I talk about this ZIA, I want to introduce you to my daughter. She’s the youngest of my three kids, two and a half years old. We call her “Lala.” There is no way I could describe how incredible she is: she’s bright, funny, self-confident, smart. Here are some representative conversations with her:

Anyway, since this new tangle is based on the letter “L,” I figured it would be fun to play around with the name “Lala.” So the ribbon at the bottom is a tangelation on Eke with a cursive “l” and “a.” I also tangleated “Ix” with the Anglo-Saxon runes “lagu” (l) and “Ac” (a). Speaking of which, at some point I really should post the rest of my Tangle-Saxon things. I’ve also got something — to be honest, I don’t know what it is — with “lala” in cursive with auras around it.

The centerpiece is, of course, the new tangle Ellish which I think its pretty groovy. I played around with a couple of variations on it. The description of the tangle calls it “Betweedy,” which I don’t really see, but I put in a little Betweedy something in it. It reminds me more of Auraknot, so I did one of those. Oh, and I tried to do a straight-line version of it below the main Ellish. It did not work the way I’d planned, but it’s something I may work on.

In honor of Star Wars day, I present this very silly visual pun. Feel free to share if you get it (but please remember to properly attribute the source! I don’t want anyone else getting blamed for this pun.)